Granovetter, Mark (1943-)

Mark Granovetter, Joan Butler Ford Professor at Stanford University, is best known for the legendary phrase, “The strength of weak ties,” that came from his 1973 article that has been widely used, and just as widely misused. Surprisingly, the article is relatively technical, and although it has had a wide secondary impact, it primarily states that no strong tie is a bridge and that it will be always a weak tie that links strongly connected, clustered subnetworks. More precisely, for large networks, there may be a long, convoluted path around the network, but the weak ties provide a local bridge.

Despite massive citation, and Granovetter's reputation among network analysts, he says that for him network analysis was a period that ended in 1976. However, he discovered that social science, and particularly his fields of economics and sociology, cannot escape the influence of a network conception.

[Page 297]Granovetter's work bears such wide reference because it epitomizes a rarely appreciated understanding: there is a strong analytical model between the “oversocialized” conception of human action in modern sociology and the atomized “undersocialized” approach of neoclassical economics (which also, contradictorily, relies on accepted norms of law-observance and decency). The model is networks, where the characteristics of individuals and those of networks are supplemented by the geometry of the relations. This geometry belongs to neither the individual nor the network, but to both.

Granovetter wrote widely on issues that directly and indirectly affect power in society and interpersonal relations in articles that deal with economic action, inequality, and “embeddedness,” where economic relations are not seen as part of a process apart from the social context but are embedded in the social networks that already exist.